5 Old School Social Media Tactics That Should Retire Now

Are your social media campaigns still giving you the results you want? If not, it could be that your tactics, which may have been big in 2012 when you first used it, are no longer effective today.

Social media is constantly evolving, which means businesses should always be on their toes when it comes to the latest tools and techniques that would effectively meet new customer demands.

We’re still early into 2018, which means there’s plenty of time to reevaluate your social media strategies and weed out the ones that are causing more harm than good.

You might as well start with these five outdated techniques:

1.Mass following

This is a common practice on Twitter and Instagram. It’s true, a lot of accounts will follow you back if you follow them, so you launch into a massive follow campaign to pump up your followers count.

While this somewhat ups your social proof, there can also be a few setbacks.

Our social media audiences are now wary about following fake or spam accounts. Usually, these accounts are those that have a bigger following number than followers.

If you mass-followed accounts without regard to their real value, you will only end up with junk. Your feed will be populated with posts that mean nothing to you and your own content will not get the traction it needs.

What you should do:

Follow real people and relevant businesses. This will give you a good base of people and potential customers with whom you can communicate.

Create a good profile. Take time to create an attractive bio and make sure your feed or timeline shows recently shared and valuable content.

Be active. Prove that you’re not a bot by resharing posts and commenting on posts.

2. Linking to influencers so they will share your content

Influencer marketing can be a valuable strategy—if done correctly. Just linking to an influencer on your post or citing them as an expert in your round-up blog in the hopes of getting them to share your content can strike them as tacky. Chances are, the influencer already knows what you’re up to and he/she will only skip past you.

What you should do:

Use their names and titles. People love to see their own names on posts and blogs. If you’re making a reference or linking their blog to your content, do something like Michael Roberts, fitness coach, recommends any of these activities.

Send them a personal note. Comment on their blog post, send them an email or a Facebook message about how awesome their work is and that you would be delighted to be given a chance to work with them.

3. Not doing videos

Images and texts are still a powerful tool to drive social media engagement. But don’t forget that videos are becoming big, too.

Make social videos a part of your content mix. Take advantage of online tools like Lumen5 and Clipman.

Use Facebook Live. FB Live allows you to deliver content instantly and to a large group of audience (your FB friends and followers will all be notified about your live stream video).

Don’t forget about YouTube! Create how-to videos and behind-the-scenes videos of how you create your products.

4. Too self-promotional

Naturally, you’d want to promote your products and services on social media. But in-your-face promotional content may come across as too egotistical and salesy. Your audiences will only get tired of hearing about you every day.

What you should do:

Share content from respected websites and publications. This will provide your audience with a more dynamic mix of both native and curated content that your readers will want to engage in.

Be subtle in your self-promotion. Other ways you can promote your brand are through:

5. Asking people to share your content

Along with sharing your link on social media, you also ask your network to post your content on their own pages. This will put you in a really awkward situation. Worse still, your contact may not end up posting it because 1) your content is not relevant to their brand, 2) they don’t agree with what you say, and 3) they just don’t like being asked (most likely, it will always be no. 3). You don’t want your professional relationships to suffer because of this.

What you should do:

Your content will be shared because they love it. So at any rate, make your content share-worthy. Create something that will arouse strong emotions, positive or negative.

Optimise for social sharing. Place your social share buttons where they can be easily seen. You can also use click-to-tweet pullouts, which captures significant quotes from your posts that your audiences can tweet out with one click.

Write addictive blogs. Over 2 million blogs are pumped out every day, so you’d want your blogs to be a total standout. We shared some tactics on how to write blogs that grab people attention in this blog.

Do you know of other social media practices that businesses should quit doing? Are any of these tactics still working for you? We’d love to hear your thoughts!

Haley

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